Tips
Random Crashes Some people experience random crashing. The truth is, everyone experiences random crashes at some point. The issue is almost always the fact that the game has run out of memory. If you suffer from this, the easiest solution is to turn down your graphics settings and turn off the skyboxes. The lower you set them, the longer you'll play without a memory crash. Framerate Issues Everyone suffers from poor frame rates as the game lingers on. The more ships, structures, and resource tracking that is going on, the slower the game is going to run. Turning off features like the autopinning of things typically will improve your framerates as will reducing your graphics options. Large Address Aware Myth Using LAA does not fix the game. The executable was written for 32 bit systems, not 64 bit systems, because at the time the game was conceived, the 64 bit system wasn't expected to be as widespread today as it turned out to be. Even if you enable this setting for the executable, it will still crash once the 2 Gigs of memory is used up. Large Address Aware allows the program to recognize memory addresses beyond the 3GB range (hence the name, Large Address Aware) that is the maximum 32 bit systems are able to recognize, but it still does not allow the game to use more then the 2GB range it was coded to use. Further more, the 32 bit operating system by default will also not allow you to use more then 2 Gigs of RAM. Therefor this method provides you with a placebo effect. You think you've solved your crashing issues when in fact, you've done nothing at all. On a system already crowded with vista or windows 7 processes, antivirus protection, and firewalls running in the background, running a program that can't access memory beyond the 3GB address range standard to a 32 bit system will suffer from having to rely heavily on swap files. Enabling LAA will allow the game to recognize more RAM addresses on a 64 bit system and thus take advantage of the less crowded space in the higher address range, but it will still crash if you exceed it's 2 Gig limit since it's a 32 bit executable. Some uneducated players are saying they used this to fix the game, when in fact they did nothing but allow the executable recognize that there is more then 3GB of RAM on their system, not increase the RAM allowed to be used like they think they did. The only TRUE way to fix the memory usage related crashing is to rewrite the executable for 64 bit systems so that the executable can actually use more RAM rather then just see that there's more space to relocate to. For example: Let's say a 32 bit program can only see RAM addresses 0 through 59. (Using 20 numbers for each Gig of RAM usage, for all of you math majors out there.) Sins being a 32 bit program can only see addresses 0 through 59, and at most, it can only use 40 of those addresses and then it crashes. Having to share that space with a 32 bit OS and other 32 bit programs like firewalls and antivirus software means that addresses 0 through 59 get very crowded very fast. Turning on the LAA flag allows it to see and relocate to addresses 0 through 22517998136852479. (And another 281474976710656 addresses via swap file usage, which is a soft coded limit to all current 64 bit processers and OSes, meaning that if and when the day comes that a computer is actually physically able to hold 4 petabytes of RAM and 256 terabytes of swap file usage, that limit can be removed and no architecture redesigns will be necessary.) Even though it can now see and relocate to all of those addresses, Sins can still only use 40 of those addresses because it is a 32 bit program. If it tries to use more then those 40 it's using, it will crash.